By Grok Entertainment Desk December 1, 2025
In the shadowed corridors of HBO’s It: Welcome to Derry, where the line between familial love and cosmic terror blurs like fog over the Kenduskeag Stream, Episode 6—”In the Name of the Father”—delivers a revelation that redefines Pennywise’s eternal grin. Premiering on Max on November 30, this penultimate installment of Season 1 doesn’t just tease the entity’s origins; it plunges viewers into a monochrome nightmare laced with crimson dread, confirming a 39-year-old theory from Stephen King’s 1986 novel It and expanding the lore in ways that promise seismic shifts across the planned three-season arc.
The episode opens in 1935 at Juniper Hill Asylum, rendered in stark black-and-white cinematography reminiscent of Schindler’s List, with splashes of red—balloons, blood—punctuating the horror like arterial warnings. A young nurse, eerily familiar as a de-aged Ingrid Kersh (Madeleine Stowe), awakens a terrified patient named Mabel in the dead of night. “The clown told you to meet him,” she whispers, leading the girl down creaking stairs to the boiler room’s infernal glow. There, amid steam vents and flickering shadows, a red balloon drifts into view, heralding Pennywise’s (Bill Skarsgård) grotesque emergence. But this isn’t the Dancing Clown’s first bow; it’s a distorted echo of something profoundly human.
As Ingrid recounts her tale to a shaken Lilly Bainbridge (Eden O’Brien) in the present day, the flashbacks peel back layers of delusion and despair. As a child around 1908, Ingrid traveled the carnival circuit with her father, Robert “Bob” Gray—a charismatic sideshow performer who donned the greasepaint and ruffles of “Pennywise the Dancing Clown” to captivate crowds. A sepia-toned photograph, unearthed from Ingrid’s attic scrapbook, captures them before a gaudy wagon emblazoned with the name, father and daughter beaming in innocent revelry. But Derry’s curse claimed him: Bob vanished near the town, his fate whispered as “taken” by the ancient entity known as It. Ingrid, refusing to flee, stayed behind, taking a job at Juniper Hill to scour for signs of her lost “Papa.”
Her visions manifest horrifically. Believing It has merely possessed her father rather than devoured and mimicked him, Ingrid lures Mabel to the basement in a desperate bid for reunion. Pennywise appears—not as the feral beast, but as a warped facsimile of Bob Gray, his face cracking like porcelain under Skarsgård’s masterful performance: familiar eyes pleading through smeared makeup, voice a guttural croon of “I’ve missed you, daughter.” The entity devours Mabel in a frenzy of fangs and glee, but reemerges in human guise, begging Ingrid to “open the door” and hear his explanations. It’s a scene that twists the knife of paternal longing into something profane, suggesting Pennywise’s clown persona isn’t mere invention but a stolen skin, pilfered from a real man whose bloodline now serves the horror.
This “Mrs. Kersh twist,” as fans are dubbing it, cements a long-speculated connection from King’s book, where the faux Mrs. Kersh (revealed as It in disguise) claims Bob Gray as her “fadder.” Welcome to Derry makes it explicit: Ingrid is that daughter, her life a Derry-trapped tragedy of denial. No longer just a helpful housekeeper with cryptic warnings, she’s Periwinkle—a secondary clown alter ego glimpsed haunting Derry’s fringes in earlier episodes. The cemetery specter Will Hanlon (Remy Mars) spied through his telescope? Ingrid, in full Periwinkle regalia, feeding victims to “awaken” her father. Her attic lair brims with clown relics: wigs, greasepaint, faded playbills. As the episode closes, she dons the costume anew, murmuring, “A daughter knows,” steeling herself for a confrontation that blurs victim and accomplice.
Viewers on X are ablaze with praise for the episode’s stylistic flair and emotional gut-punches. “Old Hollywood vibes with those red accents against the monochrome—chills!” tweeted one, echoing the consensus on the flashbacks’ evocative dread. Skarsgård’s “expressive cracks in the clown mask” draw raves, his Pennywise a tragic mimicry that humanizes without softening the terror. “Blends human roots with otherworldly horror perfectly,” another post gushed, “setting up a finale where family is the real monster.”
Yet “In the Name of the Father” isn’t solely Pennywise’s confessional. It interweaves the entity’s machinations with Derry’s festering human evils, amplifying the theme of flawed fatherhood amid racial infernos. Major Jesse Hanlon (Jovan Adepo), reeling from his son’s defiance and a comrade’s Pennywise-induced death, confines young Will (Blake Cameron James) to the army base—only for the boy to pedal tearfully into town, bottling his rage like so many Derry secrets. Charlotte Hanlon (Taylour Paige) navigates the base’s fragile sanctuary, a juke joint called The Black Spot pulsing with jazz-fueled defiance against encroaching bigotry.
Meanwhile, escaped convict Hank Grogan (Stephen Rider) seeks refuge at The Black Spot, a haven built by Black airmen—ironic, as the base is Derry’s lone Pennywise-free zone. Whispers of his presence ignite the “Legion of White Decency,” a KKK analog rallying at a dingy bar, their pitchforks and pistols primed by the entity’s fear-mongering illusions. Ronnie (Sasha Lane) reunites with her father amid the club’s electric community, but the air thickens with doom: drunk white men with guns aren’t here for harmony. As the mob descends in the cliffhanger, sirens wailing and flames flickering on the horizon, it’s clear Pennywise thrives not on isolated kills but orchestrated chaos—the 1935 Black Spot massacre looms, a bloodbath that will scar the Hanlon lineage and propel Mike Hanlon into the Losers’ Club.
The kids’ fractures deepen too. Lilly’s school hallucination of her zombified father escalates her breakdown, driving her to Ingrid’s for solace. Beverly (Lia McHugh) grapples with her own paternal phantom, Kersh shapeshifting into her abusive dad to stoke incestuous taunts—a literalization of Pennywise’s psychological barbs that some critics call “overplayed fanfic.” Yet it underscores the episode’s core: fathers, real or monstrous, wield Derry’s deadliest weapons.
As Season 1 hurtles toward its December 14 finale, “In the Name of the Father” elevates Welcome to Derry from prequel procedural to mythic excavation. Showrunner Andy Muschietti, in a recent Collider interview, hinted at “family ties deeper than blood,” teasing Seasons 2 (1935’s full horrors) and 3 (1908’s carnival cataclysm) where Ingrid’s arc—and Periwinkle’s whispers—will unravel It’s genesis. For now, in a town where “no one who dies really dies,” Pennywise’s human echo lingers: not just a clown, but a father’s ghost, dancing on the graves of the innocent. Tune in next week—Derry’s feeding frenzy is just beginning.
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